This minor update addresses a change in WordPress 6.0 that causes taxonomy sitemaps to crash, allows paginated deindexing to supersede forced indexing, and improves image cropping by preserving metadata.

Detailed log

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For everyone

• Changed: Paginated terms (archives) still get applied noindex from global settings, even when the archive is set to force-index.
• Improved: Cropping images now ports over registered metadata, such as the alt tags. This data can be used for social sharing accessibility features, such as og:image:alt and twitter:image:alt.
• Fixed: The Core Sitemaps term inclusion test will no longer cause a fatal error on PHP 8.0 and higher when using WordPress 6.0 or higher.
  • An undocumented update to WordPress 6.0 caused this issue. We backported those changes, so WordPress 5.5 through 5.9 will act all the same as 6.0.
• Removed: Downgrading to TSF v4.0.7 or lower (April 2020) is no longer supported.
  • Site-wide category-and tag robots settings may be lost upon downgrading to those versions henceforth. This will trim 12 indexes from the options array.